Ninety-Three

Wait, there's kill combos? I had no idea. Being incentivized to stay airborne makes this much more interesting.

Oh the variety is cool (sometimes I'll end up with maximum firepower whereas sometimes I'll end up with great movement, that's interesting), what I'm objecting to is the power-level disparity. You can make the perks feel different without having some be way better than others.

Many of the reviews casually refer to Dear Esther as "this game", but counting that as a vote in favour of Dear Esther being a game is hardly fair. For instance, this review: That is a person who repeatedly refers to it as a game, while outright stating "this is not a game". Some people use the word game even though they don't think it is one. There are more reviews like that which repeatedly refer to it as a game while containing sentiments like "this book that calls itself a game". Even positive reviews will use the term game, then immediately suggest Dear Esther isn't one "This is a fantastic game, more of an interactive book than movie or game". This suggests to me that people are simply defaulting to calling it a "game" because they lack a concise label for "Narrative software experience", and it would be weird to write "This is a fantastic thing". I went through the first several dozen negative Steam reviews and categorized them so that we would have some quantitative data, rather than talking in generalizations: Outright agreement (deiberate cateogirization as a game ie "discussion of whether or not it's a game (it is)"): 3 Implicit agreement (casual use of "game"): 14 Implicit disagreement (casual use of "game", major critique of lack of gameplay or disaparaging use of "walking simulator"): 4 Outright disagreement (either outright "not a game" or comments like "this is a work of art"): 18 Disregarded (no commentary on gaminess, one sentence joke review): 7 Several reviews acknowledged that there was little to no gameplay, but did not use that as a major critique. Erring on the side of "Dear Esther is a game", I placed those in "implicit agreement". Using standard survey notation, that's three "strongly agree", fourteen "agree", four "disagree" and eighteen "strongly disagree". The majority disagree, and weighing the strength of their disagreement makes it even more powerful. Even if you were to count implicit disagreement as calling it a game, that's only 21-18 in favour of game, hardly fair to say most of the negative reviews call it a game. Have you done a different count of the reviews, or were you basing your statement on a less quantified, vague impression of the reviews? Let's take a quick look at the positive reviews (apologies for the shorter list, I've gotten a little tired of reading through Steam reivews by this point). Casual use of "game": 7 "whether it's a game or not really [doesn't] matter": 1 "Not a game", "more a journey than a game in itself", etc: 5 I filed positive reviews which used the term "walking simulator" but did not explicitly reject the "game" label under "casual use of game". So you claimed that most people consider it a game, saying it wouldn't be a worthwhile use of time to poll people. As evidence, you referred to the Steam reviews, which provably do not support your argument. This is why you can't just say "the evidence is that the vast majority of people would call Dear Esther a game" without inspecting the evidence.

Modern software does, but it always asks you for permission to send your data back to headquarters. People got mad when Windows 10 did so much as switch the default from "don't send data unless user accepts" to "send data unless user turns it off". Data gathering is the sort of thing I'm used to people getting very upset about.

Where is this evidence? Has someone conducted a study, done polling with a representative distribution? I'm not attempting to snarkily imply you have no evidence, I am intrigued by the idea of concrete data on this.

Microsoft claims that a vast majority of Kinect owners are still using their Kinects. Putting aside the fact that surely they are lying, this is an implicit admission that the Kinect gathers user data and sends it to Microsoft (they have breakdowns on how the Kinects are used). Did people know about this? I feel like if they did, there would have been outrage, and I don't remember outrage.

This game is really good, and I have a bunch of complaints. It wouldn't kill them to drop the minimalism for a moment and actually explain some mechanics. It took me a while to figure out how exactly Gem High triggered, and after an hour I still had no clue what it did (I had to Google it, eventually). I'm still not sure what picking up health while full on health does. I think if you pick up four health while full, you get +1 max health? I'm basically guessing. I get how perks facilitate varied play and make every game different, but some are way better than others (knife and fork), and having some characters randomly end up way more powerful than others (or from a different perspective, most characters end up way less powerful than some) doesn't feel good. The game is at its most fun when you're trying to move fast and stay airborne, but the game's mechanics are all incentivizing you to play it slow and cautious (okay technically there's Gem High pushing you forward, but that's pretty easy to keep up even while playing slow, and it's not a big deal when you lose it). Making weapon powerups come with a health or ammo boost is a clever way to encourage the player to vary their weapon. Varying your weapon sucks because you're always switching away from your favorite weapon (special shoutout to the machine-gun that tilts left or right as you move), and you're often faced with the feel-bad dilemma of "do I pass on this health/ammo, or do I switch into this shitty gun?" The shotgun eats ammo like nothing else, and works poorly with all your abilities that trigger on shooting. That stupid burst switches your fire mode from fully automatic to semi-auto for seemingly no reason other than to fuck with you. Also is it just me, or does the music sometimes randomly cut out for a second (PC version)?

The anger wasn't simply because that the writer made a mistake indicating them to not be a "true gamer". A large part of it appears to be that the writer self-described as an "Uncharted veteran" after playing a game show demo of Uncharted 2's HD remaster, and mistaking it for Uncharted 4. Lots of angry internet people are interpreting this as a deliberate lie. Also, the article appears to have been written by a her, not a him (Brenna Hiller). Edit: For those interested, here's a link to a site that mirrored the article before it was taken down.

RE1 is a game with very old-school sensibilities. Half of it is inscrutable adventure-gamey puzzles and some gotcha deaths. You pretty much have to play with a guide. The other half is a kind of survival horror that the series has increasingly shied away from: when RE1 says survival horror it means "There are six zombies and you have two bullets", and "You have limited saves. Not save slots, limited saves". I'm not saying it's a bad game (my memories of it are too old and hazy to have any idea of whether or not it holds up today), but it's thoroughly unrelated to RE4. Liking RE4 is absolutely no indication that RE1 is for you.

I just finished a 100% run of the Recently completed video games thread, I was really disappointed that there's no achievement for it. Edit: Well this comment looks silly now that it's responding to a joke that's been moved to another thread. But it's silly in a way I like, so I'm leaving it.

Thumbs! I have a question, a philosophical quandary for you! I was on a Skype call with a friend, and we realized that my headset mic was faintly picking up audio coming from the headset speakers. Testing this phenomenon, I put on some music and asked "Can you hear that?" My friend responded "I can hear faint music, but I can't tell what it is." Then she guessed, correctly "Is that Never Gonna Give You Up?" Now to be clear, my friend could not actually recognize the song based on the audio, instead she used her knowledge of me to deduce "Ninety-Three is playing a song for someone else. It's probably Never Gonna Give You Up, that seems like a Ninety-Three move." The question is: Did I successfully Rickroll my friend? Can you Rickroll someone who doesn't hear the (intelligible) audio?

Blue jeans may be a poor example, but there are plenty of things with meaning or importance to white people. Are items of significance to white people supposed to be off-limits to black people? I also feel that your definition is a shifting of the traditional goalposts of cultural appropriation: are you saying that rap doesn't "belong" to black people and that white people are free to use it? After all, it was simply invented and popularized by black people. I could not disagree more. Do you really not see the problem with a system that says "This [cultural appropriation] is bad when you do it to one race [black people] but not bad when you do it to another race [white people]"?

Jeez, I have played Fallout 3, Divinity, and XCOM, but somehow I completely forgot about those explosive barrels. Huh. Fun story! When Bulletstorm was in development, the explosive barrels were green (they didn't want to be cliche). Players didn't shoot the green barrels. They just didn't internalize that green barrels were explosive. The devs painted the barrels red and their problems went away. Apparently players have extremely strong expectations about the behaviour of barrels.

X-COM (note the dash) is the 1994 MicroProse game, XCOM (no dash) is the 2012 Firaxis game. As someone who loves X-COM to death and thinks that XCOM was the digital equivalent of defacing the Mona Lisa, the fact that people get this wrong bothers me greatly.

Attempting to frame cultural appropriation as some kind of copyright-esque "we own that" affair never sat well with me. I have many issues, most of which the article touches on, but as an extension of the "cultural purity" thing the article highlights, doesn't the copyright approach tell us that black people shouldn't appropriate blue jeans from white culture? I've never seen anyone discussing cultural appropriation suggest that it's even possible to appropriate from white culture. To argue that appropriation is about ownership, one must acknowledge that white people made a lot of stuff, and either accept that ("No blue jeans for black people"), or create a "white people exemption" that denies them the same ownership that would be granted to others ("White people can't own things"). Both of those seem terribly flawed to me.

The creator made an impassioned defense of Mountain as a game, so unless he went deep on some kind of definition-challenging performance art thing, I think he genuinely wants Mountain to be called a game.

It's silly because the author is not automatically right about the genre of their creation (maybe genre is a bad word, you can see what I mean though) any more than they're right about the meaning of it. If I as the author of this post state that this post is a movie, that doesn't make it so. Now I'm doing that deliberately, but it's easy for the author to be wrong about genre in good faith. The cleanest example I can think of is structured poetry like limericks or traditional haiku. If the author does not notice a mistake in syllable count, rhyming scheme, or so on, they will create something they call a limerick, but is objectively not one. I'd also like to defend the Harry Potter comparison: Both Harry Potter (the book, anyway) and, say, In Flanders Fields exist in the medium of "purely textual works". Calling one a book and one a poem is an arbitrary labeling of two things within the same medium. Mountain and, say, Far Cry 2, both exist in the medium of "software which output images on a screen and sounds, and modify their output in response to user input". It seems like a perfect comparison. Whenever this debate comes up, if the people on the "This software which is unlike traditional video games is still a game" side give a definition of "game", I've found that it tends to be impossibly broad. I'm at work so I don't have time now to go look up some of the articles I'm thinking of, but I'd like to point out that your definition of "game" encompasses the following Javascript game I just wrote: If that's a game, then "game" is not a useful label because it imparts no more information than "software".

Well that's silly. If the programmer who made notepad.exe tells you it's a game, does that make it one? Getting labeling right is important, if I decide that I want to see a romantic movie, and Michael Bay's Transformers is mislabeled as a romance, I'm going to have a bad experience due to my unmet expectations. People can't hand you Harry Potter and tell you that it's a poem, similarly I don't think that people should hand you Mountain and tell you that it's a game. I think this largely grew out of the response and discourse surrounding Dear Esther. A bunch of people played Dear Esther and said "This isn't even a game" and "This is dumb and bad!" People who liked Dear Esther came in to defend it, and rather than engage with the criticism by pointing out that non-games can be smart and good, they argued that Dear Esther was a game, and that premise was passed down in the DNA of all subsequent "What is game?" discussions, so now we've got a significant amount of people defining "game" so broadly that literally anything that runs on an integrated circuit can be called a game.

I had a random thought: Have you ever seen a game with explosive barrels where the barrels are placed anything less than perfectly? I was playing a game and thought to myself "Jeez, these badguys couldn't get exploded any better if they were trying", then I realized that described every game I could remember. It feels like explosive barrels are no longer an interesting part of an envrionment, instead they're a skip-ahead button: "Tired of shooting dudes? One bullet to this barrel and those dudes will go away".

The thing I'm angriest about, Ben, is that there's a thread called "It's beginning to look a lot like..." but you used "It's beginning to look a lot like fishmen" in this thread instead. If you're going to do this, at least do it right.

I haven't played much XCOM (the Firaxis one), but I enjoy the pacing in both X-COM (original) and Xenonauts (modern spiritual successor). If you're scouting and finding no aliens, tension mounts as you adjust your mental model and the density of aliens in the remaining unexplored area climbs. If it gets too dense, you can get very methodical and slow down because you're certain there will be some aliens in this next building. If you find lots of aliens early, then you get a big fight followed by a sweep of the remaining area which you know is mostly empty, so you can go faster, or you can go slow and feel super safe. I can see how XCOM would mess up that pacing with its weird "aliens are static until scouted" thing which actively punishes scouting.

I had a random thought: Why do so many games have broken economies? The kind where you have so much money that you can always buy everything you want in every shop you find such that money isn't really a resource. I would think that it's easy to notice that the game works that way in development, and I would think most developers understand that's not the way things ought to work, so why does it keep happening?

Huh, that episode did nothing for me. Same here.

I'm with Merus, The Martian earns so many brownie points for clearly giving a shit. As for nitpicks (this is the book version, but I assume the movie adopted these details, they're pretty big):

I also quit Fez because I got sick of navigating the overworld. If there had just been a fast travel button I would've kept playing.